1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of computer processors. More particularly, the invention relates to a fault tolerant apparatus and method for elliptic curve cryptography.
2. Description of the Related Art
Invasive attacks based on fault injection are one of the major threats in industrial cryptography. An adversary performs the fault attacks on a cryptographic implementation by injecting faults at some specific circuit elements. It could either be a memory element (M safe-error) or a computational data-path (C safe-error). The injected fault/error could be safe or unsafe which means it could make the final output fault free or faulty, respectively. This circuit behavior with the injected fault is exploited to find out the secret key bits of the underlying cryptographic protocol.
Prior art techniques exist for protecting the elliptic curve against side-channel attacks. In particular, current techniques exist for protecting RSA and elliptic curve schemes against side-channel attacks and C safe-error based fault attacks. While deterministic mechanisms to identify the existence of M safe-error vulnerability to a circuit in RTL form have been proposed, there is no existing solution to protect elliptic curve implementations against M safe-error based fault attacks. Thus, additional techniques are needed to protect elliptic curve-based public key infrastructures against M safe-error attacks.